The researchers drew inspiration from wind instruments in devising these mechanisms, which they call Acoustruments.
Your smartphones will get even smarter with this new technology that makes you control your device's controls acoustically.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research have developed an inexpensive alternative - a toolbox of physical knobs, sliders and other mechanisms that can be readily added to any device.
The researchers drew inspiration from wind instruments in devising these mechanisms, which they call Acoustruments. The idea is to use pluggable plastic tubes and other structures to connect the smartphone's speaker with its microphone. The device can then be controlled by acoustically altering sounds as they pass through this system.
Just as a simple slide whistle or flute can produce expressive music, these Acoustruments can add a wide range of functionality to a smartphone, including proximity and pressure sensors. And because no electrical circuitry is involved, the plastic Acoustruments can be made rapidly and inexpensively.
Lead author of a study, Gierad Laput, a Ph.D., said that they were providing people with tangible interactivity at basically no cost, And as using smartphones as computers to control toys, appliances and robots already was a growing trend, particularly in the maker community, this could make the interactivity of these new "pluggable" applications even richer.
Wind instruments take a sustained source of sound from a mouthpiece and then alter it by changing the cavity - with a series of holes, as in a flute, or by changing its size, as with a trombone. Acoustruments operate in a similar manner; the smartphone speaker produces continuous "sweeps" of ultrasonic frequencies; interactions that block, open holes or change the length or diameter of the plastic tubes connecting the speaker to the microphone alter this acoustic signal.
Experiments by the CMU and Disney researchers showed that Acoustruments can achieve 99 percent accuracy in controlling the device.
Acoustruments can be made with 3-D printers, with injection molds, or even by hand in some cases, Laput said. The ultrasonic frequencies are inaudible to people and the pluggable structures are designed to block out interference from external noise.
The paper will be presented at CHI 2015, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Seoul, Korea.
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